Artist Sarah Sze on how Hong Kong inspired work in her first Asia solo exhibition in city
The celebrated US artist is showing her large, dramatic multimedia and layered artworks at Gagosian gallery in Hong Kong
One of the inspirations for Sarah Sze’s first Asia solo exhibition, which opens at the Gagosian Hong Kong gallery on March 25, was an earlier visit to M+, the museum in Hong Kong’s waterfront West Kowloon Cultural District.
Gazing out at Victoria Harbour last summer, the dramatic convergence of hills, water and metropolis made an impression which followed her back to her New York studio.
“Everything in Hong Kong is piled up against each other, which is what I love about it. The boundaries are entirely mixed,” she says.
The 56-year-old professor of visual arts at Columbia University, New York, is among the most celebrated American artists of her generation, with notable honours including the 2003 MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the “genius grant”, and this month’s inaugural Meraki Artist Award from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
And then there is the not-quite tongue-in-cheek article in Vogue magazine which called her and her husband, Siddhartha Mukherjee, the Indian-born doctor-author, the “most brilliant couple” in New York.
She is perhaps best known for vast, immersive multimedia installations and her many-layered “paintings” which blur boundaries between genres, between analogue and digital materials, between Eastern and Western artistic traditions and between realism and abstraction.